The Manifesto Project team invites users of the Manifesto Dataset to submit abstracts and papers for a conference on 7-8 March 2019 at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars using the Manifesto Dataset and/or the Manifesto Corpus and to foster a dialogue between users and the core team. The conference offers participants the opportunity to present current projects using Manifesto Project data.

Since its foundation in the 1970s, the Manifesto Project has maintained its general goal in measuring party positions and preferences across time and space. Being initiated by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) in the 1970s, it was continued as the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) in the 1990s and 2000s, and has been funded by the German Research Foundation under the name Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) since 2009. The widely used Manifesto Dataset which offers data on party preferences on specific policy issues and overarching policy scales in over 60 countries has strongly influenced research on political parties in the last decades. Recently, the Manifesto Project has extended its data collection and now provides access to the Manifesto Corpus – the digital and annotated manifesto collection of MARPOR. This text corpus allows the application of modern methods of text analysis that are receiving increasing attention in political science. Both the data set and the corpus have been and are used to study party competition, political behavior, processes of democratic representation and questions beyond.

In particular we are looking for contributions that

make innovative use of the Manifesto Dataset or Manifesto Corpus in substantial research on political parties, party competition and representation,

Being an active political science scholar, having been significantly involved in the drafting process of the 2005 and 2010 Labour manifesto and having been the Head of Policy Planning in 10 Downing Street he will deliver insights into manifestos from a scientific as well as from an inside party perspective.

Discussants: tba

Submission: Please submit an abstract of max. 300 words with a paper title, 3-5 keywords, and the name and affiliation of all authors to manifesto-conference@wzb.eu (as an attached PDF or directly in the email).

Deadlines:

Deadline for abstract submission: 18 November 2019

Notification of acceptance: 26 November 2019

Deadline for paper submission: tba (end of February 2019)

Travel costs:

We are able to cover travel costs of up to 400€ for scholars from Europe, and up to 600€ for scholars coming from outside of Europe. Reimbursement is limited to one author per paper. In case you are in need of such a travel grant in order to attend the conference, please inform us.